Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to video coding. In particular, the present invention relates to texture image compression in 3D video coding.
Description of the Related Art
Three-dimensional (3D) television has been a technology trend in recent years that targets to bring viewers sensational viewing experience. Various technologies have been developed to enable 3D viewing. Among them, the multi-view video is a key technology for 3DTV application among others. The traditional video is a two-dimensional (2D) medium that only provides viewers a single view of a scene from the perspective of the camera. However, the multi-view video is capable of offering arbitrary viewpoints of dynamic scenes and provides viewers the sensation of realism.
The multi-view video is typically created by capturing a scene using multiple cameras simultaneously, where the multiple cameras are properly located so that each camera captures the scene from one viewpoint. Accordingly, the multiple cameras will capture multiple video sequences corresponding to multiple views. In order to provide more views, more cameras have been used to generate multi-view video with a large number of video sequences associated with the views. Accordingly, the multi-view video will require a large storage space to store and/or a high bandwidth to transmit. Therefore, multi-view video coding techniques have been developed in the field to reduce the required storage space or the transmission bandwidth. A straightforward approach may simply apply conventional video coding techniques to each single-view video sequence independently and disregard any correlation among different views. In order to improve multi-view video coding efficiency, typical multi-view video coding always exploits inter-view redundancy.
While inter-view correlation is useful for improving coding efficiency of texture images in 3D video coding, there is also significant correlation between the texture images and the depth maps. It should be beneficial to exploit the correlation between the texture images and the depth maps to further improve coding efficiency of texture image compression. Furthermore, it is desirable to develop a texture image compression scheme with improved coding efficient upon an existing high efficiency coding standards such as H.264/AVC or the emerging High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) system.